It's always difficult to narrow an entire year of games down to just a select set of the best, but this task seemed harder than usual in 2012. The year really was an embarrassment of riches as far as video games, with plenty of excellent, innovative games ranging from indie to AAA, from iOS to high-end PC.

This is our best attempt to narrow that great year to 20 games that we feel no one should miss. Obviously there were some personal picks from our editors that didn't make the cut; a small sample of these are included in the "best of the rest" section at the end of this piece. Even with that, there are plenty of deserving games that we weren't able to include. Let us know what you thought were the best games of the year in the comments.

20. Dustforce

Hitbox Team
Windows, Mac, Linux

Image courtesy of Hitbox Team

It’s easy to think that there’s nothing new to see in a genre as old and overdone as platform games, but Dustforce proves just how false this is. Ostensibly a game about cleaning up detritus, the game is really about finding that perfect line of momentum through some exquisitely designed 2D levels, using a careful combination of slides, dashes, double jumps, wall and ceiling runs, and mid-air attacks.

The gentle learning curve quickly makes these things second nature, and turns each level into an almost balletic performance, forcing you to strive not just for completion, but perfection. The result can be maddeningly frustrating at points, but it’s all worth it for that one pure moment of well-earned success.

19. Final Fantasy: Theatrhythm

Square Enix
Nintendo 3DS, iOS

As a love letter to obsessive Final Fantasy fans, packed with the series’ signature music, this game was guaranteed to sell well even if the gameplay was utter tripe. So it was a bit surprising that Theatrhythm is one of the freshest and most interesting takes on the rhythm genre in recent years. The game takes great advantage of the 3DS touchscreen for a number of different rhythm-keeping modes that requiring precise movements and flicks in time with the music, rather than just taps.

It’s accessible enough for beginners, but some songs can get pretty darned tough even for rhythm game experts. The way the game integrates light RPG mechanics and character building into the mix gives a bit of extra depth that’s lacking in many other rhythm games. Maybe there’s life in this half-dead genre yet.

As Jon Brodkin summed up, "Final Fantasy Theatrhythm perfectly mixes nostalgia and clever gameplay, combining Guitar Hero-style mechanics with battles and the best music from the Final Fantasy series."

18. FTL

I have yet to beat FTL, and it’s not for lack of trying. There have been times I’ve come close, methodically building up my ship’s crew, defenses and attack power as I explore a randomly-generated galactic map. But then I’ll have the bad luck to stumble across some overpowered ship, or lose precious resources in a random accident, or have my crew die on a seemingly safe away mission, and all the careful progress will be totally lost.

Yet I keep coming back to the game, hopeful that next time will be the one I escape what seems an inevitable failure. That’s a testament to the core design of the game, which has a deep base of tactical logic beneath the capricious and cruel fate. And I always know that, the next time I fail, at least it will likely be in a way I have never failed before.

17. Mark of the Ninja

Mark of the Ninja made me actually feel more like a ninja than any game before it, which is saying something considering how common the character trope is in video games. The key is in the way the game grants players just enough information to feel like a preternaturally gifted stealth warrior, without offering so much making that player feel like an invulnerable superhero. Whether it’s seeing the footfalls of an unseen guard as small rippling clouds or seeing an enemy’s last known position as a quickly-fading outline, the visual presentation is top notch.

It doesn’t hurt that the game’s slowly expanding bag of ninja tricks is incredibly enjoyable, or that that the game rewards you for using the most inventive and/or stylish way of clearing rooms, offering many distinct methods for solving potential problems. Overall, Mark of the Ninja is just an extremely well-designed and thought out stealth experience.

16. Guild Wars 2

First off, there’s the world of Tyria, a huge, beautiful place filled to the brim with opportunities for heroism. But Guild Wars 2 doesn’t simply paste the usual MMO tropes onto this environment. Instead, it advances the genre in some important ways, streamlining the quest-giving process and overhauling the character advancement system to largely eliminate the “level grinding” that required getting to the most interesting end-game content in other MMOs. The epic “world boss” fights, which can involve dozens of players at once, are sprinkled throughout the game in a way that breaks up the usual MMO errand-quest monotony quite well.

Add in great PvP options, a subscription-free business model, and the sheer amount of available content, and you have what’s easily the year’s most compelling MMO experience.

15. Letterpress

There are probably thousands of word games on iOS at this point, but there’s a reason Letterpress is one of the few to catch on with a wide audience. The well-balanced two-player competition mixes the pure vocabulary and pattern matching of a game like Boggle or Scramble with the positioning of a board game like Risk. This means that the best word isn’t necessarily the longest, or the one with the most difficult letters, but the one that uses the best positioned tiles.

Sure, games can often come down to games of chicken where both players don’t dare to take the second-to-last letter, for fear of ending the match on the losing side. Still, the tight mix of game styles and tight Game Center integration has made this our go-to iOS app for filling a few space minutes this year.

14. Uncharted: Golden Abyss

The game that finally proved that portable games don’t have to be the neglected cousins to their console counterparts anymore, Uncharted: Golden Abyss launched the Vita with a meaty exploration adventure that’s easily the equal of it’s PS3 predecessors, with top-notch production values and gameplay that’s nearly indistinguishable from the games that came before it. It remains to be seen if there’s a market for this kind of game and this kind of system in a world dominated by Angry Birds and free iPhone apps, but it’s nice that someone was able to make it anyway.

134 Reader Comments

Not a bad list. Nice to see some excellent indie titles get some time in the limelight. All too often these lists devolve into a competition between who had the largest budget rather than honest game play.

I've been trying Super Hexagon off and on the last few months, but ultimately it's just too frustrating to spend enough time on it to develop the muscle memory. A slightly less steep learning curve would be useful; think Tetris...

As a nearly fanatical fan of the Diablo franchise, it is sad to me that D3 does not occupy the top spot on this list; not because I think it deserves to be, but because it clearly does not even deserve a mention.

Good list. I would have included WoW:MoP - not just because it was a really great expansion (it was) but also because it defied expectations that it would be crap, and added some great story and entirely new features, and shut up all the "Carebear!" cries from the peanut gallery.

Battle Academy on the iPad. It's literally a full PC game poured into the (sometimes groaning) iPad. It's $20 but you get a full-fat game, not another TD.

I like that this list shows there are gems all the way from AAA to retro-blocky indie. Won't shut up the assertions that "all games are crap these days!", but we can dream!

It's quite hard to make a list this year given there was no AAA title that clicked with everybody, the way a Red Dead Redemption or a AC: Brotherhood did. This is a good effort.ME3 had its issues. AC3 had its huge issues. RE6 was looked as a joke. Max Payne 3 was a second rate (but often pleasant) effort by Rockstar, gaming systems are getting old and less attractive to developers who might choose to develop instead for the next generation, smartphones took a lot of mobile gaming from the portable consoles. But, on the other hand, there's some definite appetite for new ideas and concepts that looks very promising.

I've been trying Super Hexagon off and on the last few months, but ultimately it's just too frustrating to spend enough time on it to develop the muscle memory. A slightly less steep learning curve would be useful; think Tetris...

I don't think it would work with Super Hexagon as there really isn't much to it, there's not many sequences so I think if it started off slower it would feel fairly dull. For the first few goes I found it fairly tough to get started but it didn't take long to start making progress as the first level is generally slow enough you can just react as the patterns come along rather than pre-empting them as you need to do with the later ones.

Thought this wasn't a bad list, Borderlands 2 is my game of the year followed by Super Hexagon (PC version) so good to see both on the list.

It is nice to see. I've been a Mac user for about 20 years and never really investigated Mac gaming because I've always read/heard "Macs aren't for gamers." and I've got a PS3 and my son has an XBox 360 so I just haven't looked. But yeah that's pretty nice to see the Mac getting some gamer love.

I bought FTL the other day on Steam and already have 14 hours on it. I dreamt about it last night as if I was a kid playing Tetris again. I can get to the final boss with some regularity, but I just can't beat it.

Look, I'll be the first to admit I'm not an impartial judge: I'm a Halo addict that would hit Cortana in a second, even if it would basically mean poking clumsily at an ephemeral hologram. But dammit! Even non-fans have begrudgingly nodded that H4 respectfully re-invents a well-worn series. Not to mention the embarrassment of gameplay riches for your $59 with a single player/co-op campaign, a huge multiplayer universe, and the "SpartanOps" co-op mode with an animated side-story narrative plus weekly missions on XBL.

Halo may be the series that all the PC gamer hipsters line up to hate, but fuck 'em, I say! It made my year, and I'm glad Microsoft didn't retire the franchise.

oh God, did I really just say I'd make sweet, sweet love to a video game character?

Great writeup. What I would like to see though is a "5 Most Anticipated Titles for 2013" feature story. I cut cable a long time ago and am generally an introvert, so I just don't know what games are coming around the bend unless Ars or a few others comments on them. Is there a new GTA coming soon? inFAMOUS 3?

So far for 2013 I am looking forward to Dead Space 3, but know of nothing else.

Also, I seem to be the ONLY person that didn't like Dishonored. I played it for about ten hours and never felt the urge to play it again. It just never pulled me in like Mass Effect did.

Why Uncharted? Those games are so terribly boring. According to Digital Foundry, Uncharted on the PS Vita doesn't run anywhere near native resolution, 720x408 versus the native resolution of 960x544. Which explains the graphics appear so blurry. Last I tried, the loading times were just flat out bad. Far too long for a portable that already has extremely limited battery life. And, again, those games are just flat out boring. The only reason they sell well at all is because Sony platforms have no good exclusive games and, thanks to the PS3 being the weaker system (sorry Peter Bright, theoretical performance doesn't count), the PS3 gets terrible ports. There really is nothing good about the Uncharted games.

No ACIII at all?Really?Not even in Best of the rest?Really really?I would have thought it a shoe in for #1 at least, but then I'm not making a list while trying to be inclusive of all genres and platforms. Maybe divvy it up between platforms. It seems there should be a "Best PC/XBox 360 Games" list followed by an easily skipped "Best of the rest (lol)" list.

AC3 probably would have made the list if it wasn't so glitchy and buggy. The latest one I've discovered: fist-fighting sometimes doesn't work. Your blows are simply ineffectual and you have to wait to die before trying again. Eventually, it will work.

The voice acting is great but the characters' mouths and body movements don't match up with the voices.

The collision detection is atrocious - it is normal to just walk right through stuff, like trees, crowds, whatever. Even Connor's braid on the side of his head is half embedded in his skull during cutscenes.

A lot more bugs were fixed with the patches (my favourite: you could jump into a stack of boughs but never jump out again). But there are other, gameplay-related issues too, like the never-ending Hickey chase that must end with a particular tackle (this is never made clear).

It's too bad, as I loved AC2 and enjoyed Brotherhood and Revelations. But AC3 should not be on any Best Of 2012 lists.

This is probably the best list I've seen from Ars in recent months. No drummed-up clickbait, no trolling, just honest to goodness opinion. Do I completely agree? No, Torchlight II should be #1. However, I can't argue with the top 20.

Why Uncharted? Those games are so terribly boring. According to Digital Foundry, Uncharted on the PS Vita doesn't run anywhere near native resolution, 720x408 versus the native resolution of 960x544. Which explains the graphics appear so blurry. Last I tried, the loading times were just flat out bad. Far too long for a portable that already has extremely limited battery life. And, again, those games are just flat out boring. The only reason they sell well at all is because Sony platforms have no good exclusive games and, thanks to the PS3 being the weaker system (sorry Peter Bright, theoretical performance doesn't count), the PS3 gets terrible ports. There really is nothing good about the Uncharted games.

You, sir, do not like things that are fun.

I like fun, and find uncharted not fun. But I am averse to lots of plot (in cut scene form) and fake interactivity (press X to do everything in the game or follow some linear path to get across a chasm with 0 difficulty or challenge - it's just there to make you feel big until you realize it's just a trick).

The demo of DMC shows how you do this properly (or a lot closer) - hopefully the level design across the game keeps up with the one in the demo. It tends to keep you playing while you do the things that aren't normally available in the base gameplay.

I think it was more likely that there wasn't enough new content in the enhanced edition to justify placing it on a "best of" list in 2012. Otherwise THQ could just re-skin and release Freespace 2 every year and cinch the top spot over and over again.

...

THQ, you should just re-skin and release Freespace 2 every year. I will throw money at you. Don't change the gameplay, don't add a damn thing. Just slap a new coat of paint on it and auto-charge my credit card.

I think it was more likely that there wasn't enough new content in the enhanced edition to justify placing it on a "best of" list in 2012. Otherwise THQ could just re-skin and release Freespace 2 every year and cinch the top spot over and over again.

I think he's commenting on the fact that they spelled the game "Balder's Gate" in the review.

I am playing Hotline Miami right now. God damn that game is hard, but it is so satisfying when you clear a floor. And I feel really bad about not snorting lines of cocaine off my mouse while playing it, because that is obviously an intended, integral part of the game experience.

Pretty good list! I might juggle a few things, but that's how it always goes, and I think you got the highlights. A lot more indies that might qualify, but there are just so dang many of them.

Absolutely not. The game is horribly glitchy, the stealth is completely broken, there is very little actual assassinating going on, and the missions designs are incredibly, stupidly restrictive. You deviate just a bit from what the mission scripter intended and you die instantly, no flexibility allowed.

Example: I've been instakilled for being told to 'Defend the house!' from thugs in a Homestead mission. Okay, so I kill one. I'm a goddamned Assassin. 'DESYNCHRONIZED: You killed one of the thugs.'

Another example: I've been desynced for shooting someone the game told me to stop from reaching (whatever it was). 'Stop him before he reaches the (whatever)!' Okay - BLAM. 'DESYNCHRONIZED' Because the mission scripter decided I had to chase him on foot just because.

One more: Follow Benedict Arnold. Okay... sneak sneak sneak... middle of a patch of vegetation Connor just stands up, not a goddamn thing I can do about it because the game decides when I'm sneaking. Dead. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Now the naval missions, those were great. But overall this game is just a gigantic mess with no clear vision or mechanics, especially compared to AC2.

Edit: I just realized - this is an Assassin game... as designed by a TEMPLAR. Shocking plot twist!

Why Uncharted? Those games are so terribly boring. According to Digital Foundry, Uncharted on the PS Vita doesn't run anywhere near native resolution, 720x408 versus the native resolution of 960x544. Which explains the graphics appear so blurry. Last I tried, the loading times were just flat out bad. Far too long for a portable that already has extremely limited battery life. And, again, those games are just flat out boring. The only reason they sell well at all is because Sony platforms have no good exclusive games and, thanks to the PS3 being the weaker system (sorry Peter Bright, theoretical performance doesn't count), the PS3 gets terrible ports. There really is nothing good about the Uncharted games.

You, sir, do not like things that are fun.

I would have ditched Uncharted as well. If it's on there to prove that handheld games can be the equal of their console equivalents, well Nintendo's been putting their A-teams on the handheld versions since the DS, with the handheld entries sometimes even being better than the home ones (Mario Kart DS and 7 were both better than MK Wii, Animal Crossing DS destroyed the Wii entry, etc.). The same team made the home and handheld entries, and it shows. Meanwhile Uncharted was farmed out to a second-tier, handheld-only studio. If you're recognizing pure production values and technical impressiveness, I'd give it to Assassin's Creed Liberation, which is lots of ways is better than the real AC3 and is impressive as all hell on the Vita. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Uncharted, but there's little to put Golden Abyss among the year's best after you overlook the shiny.

Otherwise a really strong list and one that I have little more than minor quibbles with.

Great writeup. What I would like to see though is a "5 Most Anticipated Titles for 2013" feature story. I cut cable a long time ago and am generally an introvert, so I just don't know what games are coming around the bend unless Ars or a few others comments on them. Is there a new GTA coming soon? inFAMOUS 3?

Spots 1-5: Sim City.

It's going to suck. I just know it. I am going to have my heart broken.

I still lost the game. Winning FTL requires (I believe) 8 sectors of luck in the random placement of shops and perfect strategy throughout your trip.

I like the game, but I think it should be a bit easier.

You gotta consistently beat it on easy first. Had to swallow my pride and get it so I could beat it more than half the time that way and learn the advantages of mantis boarding crews and earn the extra ships, etc.

Now I can beat it about 1/3 to 1/2 the time (I think) on normal mode. Which feels about right for me since it's not a huge time investment per game... your mileage may vary.

Halo has always been an acquired taste. If it was your first FPS, you probably love it. If you grew up playing FPSes on the PC, from the days of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, you probably don't see what all the fuss is about.

As a nearly fanatical fan of the Diablo franchise, it is sad to me that D3 does not occupy the top spot on this list; not because I think it deserves to be, but because it clearly does not even deserve a mention.

It was on the "Worst Games of 2012" list, because, to be perfectly honest, the Ars editor who reviewed it threw a fit when they nerfed attack speed -- prior to it he wasn't exactly complimentary either, but after that he lambasted it whenever given the opportunity.

I don't think it deserved a spot on either list -- yes, the first playthrough was (IMO) great, the graphics and immersion were wonderful, but the "endgame" was exactly the same as the endgame in Diablo I and II -- that is to say, there wasn't one. That may have been acceptable a decade ago, but it isn't really nowadays. Similar games, like Torchlight, have shown that there's a better way.

Overall I think it was worth the money, but not worth being on a best of list.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.